“I appreciate the warning,” Will said. “You say you ran into him, right? Did you talk with him?”
“A little. He asked me about the war, who I rode with. Mostly, he wanted to know if I heard of any bluebellies on the move.”
“What’s he look like?”
“He’s older than you’d think. Maybe forty or forty-five? Little, wiry fella. Mean face with a hawklike nose and hawklike eyes. That’s what he made me think of, perched up on the fine horse of his: a cold-eyed hawk, ready to make a kill.”
“What color hair?”
“Kind of a reddish-brown, I’d say, and a sandy-colored beard with a good deal of gray in it. You know who he looks like, now that I think of it?” Benny laughed. “It’s pretty ironic.”
“Who?”
“General Sherman, the man who burned the South.”
A clear image filled Will’s mind. Everyone south of the Mason-Dixon Line knew what the dreaded and much hated General William Tecumseh Sherman looked like.
“Thanks, Benny. That’s a help.”
“You ain’t gonna go hunting him are you, Will? If you are, we’ll ride with you. At least I will. Most of the boys’ll come along. We won’t all ride back out, but we’ll stand with you.”
“I appreciate it, Benny. I really do. But no, I got cattle to drive. Someday, though, I will kill Jafford Teal for what he did to my wife’s people. That’s a promise. Anybody messes with my family, they die.
CHAPTER 31
Maggie was doing laundry in the creek, humming happily to herself, when she looked up and saw the horsemen riding her way.
For a fraction of an instant, her heart leapt for joy.
Will was home!
But then her happiness whipped away, replaced by sheer terror.
That wasn’t Will glaring at her from the front of the pack.
It was Sully Weatherspoon. And he looked angry.
Maggie dropped the washing with a loud scream and ran for the house.
She didn’t even think about what she was doing. She just jumped up and ran, frightened in a way she couldn’t have even explained.
Something in her, some primitive instinct, recognized danger and flooded her with fear, setting her legs and lungs in motion.
She screamed again as she sprinted toward the house, berating herself for not following Will’s advice and carrying the derringer everywhere she went.
“Mama!” she cried, hurtling toward the house as fast as her legs would carry her. “Rose!”
But then, suddenly, she slammed to a stop fifty feet from the house to avoid crashing headlong into the heaving black wall that appeared before her.
Sully had cut her off, blocking her path with his muscular black stallion.
And now the other two men closed her in.
One, she realized with fresh terror, was Gibbs, the man who had tried to hit Will with brass knuckles in town—and who’d paid dearly for that offense. His mean eyes stared out from either side of a crooked nose on a face still discolored from cuts and bruising.
The other man she did not know and did not want to know. She just wanted to get away from them.
She took a step toward the house, trying to slip around Sully, but he moved his stallion, blocking her path again and sneered down at her.
